Writing Center Staff | Williams Report

The conference provided a packed program of talks and poster sessions, a keynote speech by Wendy Bishop, and several informal social events. The mood of the conference was upbeat and friendly. Most of those attending were writing center directors happy to be among colleagues who understand the work and complexity of running a writing center. Undergraduate peer tutors also attended the conference and gave some well-received presentations. (Indeed, some of the best sessions I attended were given by peer tutors, which makes me think that we have an opportunity here to involve our own peer tutors in a similar way. The IWCA conference offers a good forum at which to gain experience as a presenter/panelist.) Hot topics of conversation wherever I listened were:

How to represent the work of the writing center to the wider academic community; how to counter perceptions of the writing center as "step-child" of some larger concern such as an English department or a Student Services program; and how to situate the writing center as an entity in its own right, with its own set of informed pedagogical practices. Regardless of the organizational situation of the writing centers I encountered, these were central and persistent questions. The main concern: to make the work of the writing center (and the work of writing) visible and meaningful to faculty and students.
How to reach students and involve them in the process of writing. Across the board, from small private colleges to large state universities, writing centers struggle to assert what it is that they really do--and do well. Clients often think of the writing center as the SpeedyMufflerKing of term-papers--you know, bolt on a new paragraph here, realign the pronouns and tenses, and off you go. Visible involvement of peer-tutors in writing center administration and "marketing" (not just in tutoring) seems to increase student interest and participation in the writing process.
How to achieve racial and gender diversity within the writing center. Just a quick glance around the conference suggests that writing center work is predominantly the work of women, and that many of the women working in writing centers are caucasian. I seldom heard gender and race disparities addressed head-on but their presence was implicit in many sessions: race and grammar; writing center culture; tutoring style; writing with engineering students; and writing across the curriculum. Greater diversity exists among the peer tutors. I was interested to listen to their accounts of relating to and tutoring students who share with them similar backgrounds (for example, one woman spoke about her work with overseas students unfamiliar with the conventions and relative informalities of US universities). The peer tutors suggest that they not only provide effective (and often empathetic) tutoring to their fellow students but that they also "advertise" the writing center ideal of a diverse group of minds working together on writing. Their accounts affirm that students respond positively to peer tutoring and to seeing that academic work is a process that need not be rigid and hierarchical.
How to work successfully with ESL students and with students whose home languages do not follow the conventions of Standard Written English. Again, questions of diversity emerge here, and questions of the kinds of language and writing valued by the university and its writing center (sometimes these two organizations are at odds). Several panels addressed the need for tutors to become conversant with both the linguistic and the social conventions with which students approach academic writing, and to follow an approach that does not view students' home languages as intellectually deficient.

Trends in writing center pedagogy/set-up

Pitt's writing center stands out in that it utilizes the expertise of full-time and part-time faculty and peer tutors, and that its director has course relief/credit for administering the center. Many of the writing centers I encountered were staffed exclusively by peer tutors; some of the smaller schools employ peer tutor administrators who run the center and report to a tenured faculty member. In most cases, peer-staffed or otherwise, the writing center director is a full-time faculty member, often tenured or tenure-stream. It was not always clear to me how much hands-on involvement the directors have, though Pitt's approach, in which the director is thoroughly involved in both the conceptual and practical organization of the writing center, seems typical.

The trend in set-up and tutoring seems to be toward the involvement (and in some cases, employment) of peer tutors. The peer tutors I met were very enthusiastic about their work and the role their writing centers played in student life; these places are buzzing! I think that Pitt is in a unique position here with its peer tutoring course/program to capitalize on the scholarly interests and the energy of undergraduates. We have the expertise to nurture peer tutors who are well-informed and thoughtful scholars as well as effective (not corrective) tutors--a program not only in tutor training but in thinking about how and why to teach. This gives us the edge in imagining the relationship between tutor and client, and in the practices of tutoring writers.

Pedagogically speaking, it seems as if everyone is following the writing-as-process and writing-across-the-curriculum approaches. Practically, though, I still encountered some methods that reward correctness/tightness over process, or which tend to cast writing in a limiting role--an adjunct to the subject matter rather than the central force in generating material for inquiry. Such a split seems typical of the difficulties we face in our own writing center at Pitt: how to reconcile a process-centered approach with the expectations of clients/courses/professors whose relationship to writing excludes development and digression. A few of the writing centers seemed to be service-oriented to the point of precluding any work beyond the grammatically correct production of formulaic essays. I don't know that they are really engaged in the work of teaching, at least not as we envision teaching within Pitt's composition program. Here is a (long!) central question for writing centers and for those of us who work in them: Are we teachers, consultants, consulting-teachers, or what; and how does the way we imagine our role shape our propensity to teach given the one-on-one tutorial relationship which can be construed exclusively as a client-consultant relationship along the lines of a business transaction? I wonder if Pitt's writing center, situated as it is within the composition program, has a vantage point from which to examine and self-consciously promote its purpose--a purpose which might get obscured or overwritten were it part of a package of student services.

Integration of computer-assisted tutorials and online resources for students and tutors is another trend evident in the set-up of many writing centers. It seems as if just about every writing center has an active website, and that in some cases the website itself provides a "virtual" tutorial--for example, advice on developing a proofreading process; how to write introductions or organize an essay, and so on. My reservation about this approach is that it tends toward the production of formulaic writing. Anecdotal evidence from the conference, however, suggests that students find website materials very useful and that well-designed sites can strengthen students' understanding of the writing process.

Culture Shock--A Look at How Humanities-Centered Writing Labs are Dealing with Science and Engineering Students. Christina Bourgeois, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Surviving African America English Vernacular (AAEV)--Ways Writing Centers Can Help. Eric O. Smith, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Revising Revision--Working with Blind and Visually Impaired Students in the Writing Center. Tara McIlmoil, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Lessons from the 'Borderland'--A Writing Center Case Study. Christine M. Fox, University of Rhode Island.

Writing Center Tutors, ESL Students, and the Logic of Translation. Deborah Reese, Armstrong Atlantic State university, Savannah.

Beyond Error Hunting--Finding and Teaching a proofreading Process. Beth Rapp Young, University of Central Florida.

Designing Space--Planning and Assessing Diversity initiatives in a Writing Center.
Bruce Pegg and Jonathan P. Benda, Syracuse University.

International and American Tutors. Vicki Edelnant, Sarah Adwell, Kenza Bemis, Shannon Ellis, Mindi Kasiga, and Irene Tsen; Wartburg College.

In the Familiar and Unfamiliar--An Analysis of Topics from the First Annual Conference of the European Writing Centers Association and the European Association for Teaching Academic Writing. Peter Carino, Indiana State University.

Developing a Writing Center in a European Context--An XML-based Solution to Tackle Multilingualism. Luuk Van Waes, Liesbeth Opdenacker, and Elke Van Steendam. University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Cultural Constraints Influencing British and American Writing Labs--'Peering' Across the Pond. Bonnie Devet and Heather Richie, College of Charleston; Margo Blythman, Celia Bishop, and Susan Orr, London Institute.

Mainstreaming Basic Writers in a Writing Center. Clyde Moneyhun, Barbara Lutz, Therese Rizzo and Mike Bogucki, University of Delaware.

Plenary Address: Inventing the Writing Center, or Roads Taken by Rebels with Causes. Wendy Bishop, Florida State University.

Integrating the Writing Center into Communication Across the Curriculum Efforts. Jill Frey and Jill Walker, Presbyterian College.

Tutor Training as Tutors Training--Collaboration, Collusion, and Campus Outreach.
Sandee McGlaun, Sarah Ballew, Carly Ferrell, Eva Isselstein, Jennifer Kock and Amanda Wood; North Georgia College and State University.

Music in the Writing Center; Friend or Foe? Claire Mischker, Winthrop University.

Winning Words--The Writing Center as Prose and Poetry Competition Sponsor. Mia Molina-Haynie and Amy Schlag, university of Montevallo.

How Do You Increase Student Usage in Your Center?--Promoting Writing Centers Using Innovative Graphic Design. Jamie Temples and April DePriest, University of South Carolina, Aiken.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell?--The Ethics of Informing Professors of Student Visits to the Writing Center. Valerie Perry, Eureka College.

1. Active involvement in the regional chapter of IWCA might be a good thing for our writing center and consultants. The regional chapter offers many networking and conference opportunities; it could become a useful component in our efforts to encourage professional development by affirming the value of the work we do as writing center tutors. Next year's IWCA conference is to be held in Hershey, PA and will be a joint venture with the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW). This gives us an excellent local opportunity to participate in the national conference. We could promote involvement in the conference as a method of sustaining intellectual interest in writing center work among our consultants and peer tutors.

2. Devote a few writing center meetings to brainstorming around the idea of conference participation. My sense is that most consultants don't realize that the work they do is potential conference material, so some practical encouragement might turn them toward this opportunity. The panels I encountered at the IWCA conference ranged widely in their approach:
- positing a question and presenting some solutions
- raising general points about pedagogy and theory
- anecdotal work from tutoring sessions
- excerpts from dissertations that address work in composition and pedagogy
- sharing best practices in tutoring and administrative management
- case studies of students' progress over a semester/project
- tutor narratives
- writing center archives
- journal-writing sessions.

The relative informality of the IWCA conference makes it a good forum for first-time presenters. We should take advantage of this opportunity to promote our tutors' work and to add Pitt's voice to the conversations about writing center pedagogy. Note: people were really interested to hear that I was from Pitt; many commended me on our composition program. Dave B's work was quoted on several occasions, both in presentations and in the keynote speech. And frankly, from speaking with other conference attendees, I discovered that we're way progressive in our approach to error, grammar, and the process and practice of reading and writing, especially in our approach to general education requirements such as GW and BRW. We have strong ground on which to stand here, and I think that it might be helpful for our tutors to know this and to hear that writing center work, which can seem local and sometimes inconsequential, in fact contributes to a larger pedagogical vision and accomplishment.

3. Incorporate into tutor training a discussion of some of the seminal articles/texts on writing pedagogy which inform our approach to tutoring. I noticed that many of the conference attendees were thoroughly conversant with the literature of the discipline and that several of the peer tutors were familiar with works such as Elbow's Writing Without Teachers and Bartholomae's Inventing the University. This impressed me and made me think about what we might gain in terms of tutor confidence and morale by situating the work of tutoring within the context of an ongoing conversation about teaching and writing. I don't mean to suggest here that we need to intellectualize the work we do or that our tutors are lacking in academic preparation. Rather, I'm interested in finding ways to develop rapport and scholarly connection within our community of tutors, and I think that awareness and discussion of the literature of the discipline might be one approach toward this end.

4. Incorporate into tutor training an awareness of the conventions of African-American English Vernacular (AAEV) and the practice and politics of code-switching into Standard Written English (SWE), which is generally the language of the academy. Eric Smith from UNC-Charlotte presented material from his doctoral and tutoring work with students whose home language conventions differ from SWE. Smith, who identified himself as a speaker of both AAEV and SWE, teaches code-switching as a form of revision in which drafts written in, say, AAEV are redrafted into "green" language which deploys the conventions of SWE. Smith also spoke anecdotally about his experience as a former student learning to write among, and with, the demarcations of his institutional and home languages. What impresses me about Smith's work is that (i) it affirms students' home language as a valid and valuable language for generating and expressing ideas, and recognizes that one's home language belongs in the writing process; (ii) that it provides an approach for students and tutors to talk about writing as situational, a process, and as a set of choices among (rather than between) the languages with which one communicates; and (iii), that it provides students with a method for reading and interpreting--rather than correcting--their own work. Along these lines, Smith provided accounts of students whose confidence and proficiency as writers increased dramatically once they approached their work as informed code-switchers and stopped thinking of themselves as "bad writers"--a category to which some of his students assigned themselves either on the basis of seeing their drafts returned with AAEV conventions marked as errors or out of frustration with a writing "process" that excluded vernacular language from the drafting stages. Smith's handout and reading list might be useful additions to our library and training materials. The handout lists key differences in AAEV and SWE typology and establishes clear patterns to read for when switching between vernacular and academic modes.

5. Consider tapping the insights of peer tutors for help in promoting the writing center and the writing process to students. A poster session by USC-Aiken peer tutors showed how peer-designed fliers, graphics, bookmarks, and web-ads spoke to students on their own terms and helped to increase student usage at the writing center.

6. Consider ways to situate the writing center as a promoter of student writing to counter the impression among students (and some faculty) that the writing center's function is solely corrective. For example, some writing centers support student-led poetry and writing competitions, hold readings, publish excerpts of student work on their writing center promotional materials (e.g. poems printed on bookmarks and fliers), exhibit student writing in its various draft stages, invite students to write about writing--"writing narratives" if you like--and showcase this work on display boards, in writing center publications, and online. (I was curious to see what's possible when financial support it unlimited: the writing center at small, private Coe College publishes a glossy literary photo journal of writing by students and faculty, provides free coffee and jolly ranchers with every consultation, and awards financial aid scholarships to incoming students who, in turn, work as peer tutors.)

The most valuable insight I gained from attending the conference is that the work of writing centers truly belongs at the center of students' learning across the disciplines, and that writing centers have the potential to occupy a unique position in student life: as places where students can gain agency and become more confident, assertive scholars in their classes and where they can experience pedagogy that situates them at the center of their own learning. It's not inconsequential that we call our workplace a "writing center" rather than a "writing lab" or a "writing room". The centrality of writing is important not only to students' writing of individual papers but to their fluency as scholars generally. Our situation as a "writing center"--with the centrifugal force that this term implies--gives us room to imagine a purpose for ourselves that promotes the writing process and writing pedagogy across disciplinary boundaries.